High on the list of things I really enjoy doing is thanking people who contribute to free software. Also high on the list is using software that works well.
So I just wanted to combine the two and say a public thanks to GP Halkes, for writing and maintaing dwdiff. I’ve been using dwdiff since early on in the MPL process, and thanks to two recent changes GP made at my request, it now works even better for my needs (and hopefully better for most people’s needs.) Thanks, GP!
I’ve been trying to get back to living my life in a task-centric manner, and Firefox Panorama, without necessarily being designed for those goals, is perfect for it. Someone else put the words in my mouth: when you’re trying to do task-centric computing, what you need is not just a place to dump tasks (a task organizer) but also a good task switcher. Virtual desktops (in either Linux or OSX) can be used to dump tasks, but they lack effective visual task switchers. Once you get used to Tab Candy, in contrast, it is an effective way to give you an overview of the tasks you’re handling and move between them in a quick, fairly non-distracting manner.
Unfortunately, it also drives me nuts, because it isn’t comprehensive. I’m very rarely using new desktop apps these days, but I’m still stuck with a lot of old ones (particularly until there is a competent, secure, self-hosted web-based word processor) and not being able to interact with them through panorama is driving me insane; it means switching back and forth between two different mental models on a regular basis, and that is painful. I’ve literally found myself trying to drag application windows into my Panorama desktop. That’s just not good, and I really hope someone uses the Panorama idea for a complete desktop soon.
(Note that despite the original name of tab candy, I don’t think ‘tabs’ is really the important thing here- the important thing is grouping data/applications together, and then having a good high-level overview of the groups when switching between them. That clicking on a collection-task brings up a ffox window with a bunch of tabs, rather than a desktop with a bunch of windows, is (I think) an implementation detail; I’d be happy with a similar organization for ‘traditional’ desktops without tabs as a starting place.)
Diaspora came to lunch at Mozilla today. Some notes.
Anyway, interesting stuff- I continue to wish them well.
[This was originally published at autonomo.us- comments over there.]
[Disclaimer: since my last post at autonomo.us, I have become an employee of the Mozilla Corporation. I don't feel this has tainted my views, but feel free to weigh that information as part of your analysis of this article. Relatedly, I do not speak for that employer when writing here; my words and ideas here are my own.]
tl;dr version: We shouldn’t throw the baby out with the bathwater. The bathwater is the ethical problems with software hosted on someone else’s server; the baby is the strength of the libre web application development stack- which may actually be the best platform for building autonomy-preserving user-oriented software.
Put yourself in 1995. I’m going to tell the you of 1995 that in 2010, there will be a software platform with the following properties:
At this point, 1995-you says ‘This sounds too good to be true. There must be a catch.’1
There are two major catches, the second a consequence of the first.2
The first catch is that the default data storage architecture is distributed, and the default licensing is effectively permissive, making it expected (though not mandatory) that users are separated from both the code they run and their data. In other words, developers who use this stack are perhaps more free than they’ve ever been in the history of computing (and not surprisingly they’ve adopted it in droves)- but users often have even less control than they had when they were using traditional proprietary desktop applications.
The you from 1995 would probably think that freedom-lovers would have reacted to this unfreedom by rewriting the thin layer of proprietary code sandwiched between gigantic gobs of free code, and/or by working to make the platform more amenable to local or distributed use. You might expect that they would even have embraced and extended the platform to make it even better for freedom.
Instead, the second catch is that fans of freedom have largely thrown the baby out with the bathwater, ignoring (or at best failing to embrace) this rich, free platform. Instead, in a story straight out of the Innovator’s Dilemma, they’ve continued to focus on traditional widget toolkits and interfaces which lack all the benefits I’ve just listed out.
It should be obvious by this point that the platform I’m talking about is HTML and the many, many application frameworks that can be used to generate it. This platform- what I’ll call the libre web application stack- is not perfect, but it has the potential to be hugely freedom-enhancing, and free software advocates should carefully consider it when thinking about developing their next app, or when planning to extend traditional software platforms to make them more free. Just because most web apps are not free does not mean the stack itself should be disregarded.
A few months ago I finished reading Eugene Bestor‘s ‘Backwoods Utopias‘, a book on the Utopian social-communitarian movements of the pre-Civil War US. Some belated notes on the book’s themes follow.
The average high school US history textbook gives a thumbnail sketch of these movements, but for those who didn’t get that or don’t remember it, the gist is that, from very shortly after Europeans reached North America until right around the Civil War, groups of people regularly launched themselves into the North American wilderness, trying to found new communities organized around communitarian and egalitarian principles. They met with some success, but eventually the movements petered out, with none of them truly surviving into the modern age.
Owen by BinaryApe, used under CC-BY
The tie from this book to my own interests should be clear, but if not, I should make them explicit: free and open source software often thinks of itself as being sui generis, but in fact it is part of a history (in this country) of retreat from established economic structures with the intent of creating parallel systems that would eventually compete with or replace those established structures with something simultaneously individually empowering and socially just. (See also.) I’m both personally and professionally curious about gleaning lessons from such past experiments- so I picked up the book. If any of this blog’s readers have suggestions either of more histories of this movement, or of histories of other similar movements (watch this space for a post on the local food movement soon), please do let me know in email or comments.
Unfortunately, Bestor’s intended follow-up book (covering the 1840s to the end of the movement) was never completed, which limits the lessons that can be drawn about the decline of the movement. Nevertheless, some observations and themes from the book:
I’ll refrain from drawing any direct conclusions for free and open source software here, in part because many of them will be obvious to many of my readers, and also because my reading of the book (especially several months after the fact) is inevitably heavily biased by my own thinking about social movements like this one, so I’m not sure whether any ‘lessons’ would reflect actual history or just my interpretation (compounded with Bestor’s.) With or without direct applicability, though, the book was an interesting read for a history nut, and left me with a lot of food for thought.
My boss has written a blog post that tries to bring together some recent data points from across the privacy spectrum; it is worth a read. I’ve been noting a few (much smaller, more trivial) things myself over the past few days that suggest to me that privacy concerns in general, but facebook-related privacy concerns in particular, may be reaching a bit of a critical mass.
No Facebook by avlxyz used under CC-BY-SA.
Some anecdata:
These are just anecdotes, and not real data, but to me this feels vaguely different from the ‘rebellion’ in 2006. At that time I said ‘people adjust and things blow over sometimes.‘ This one feels different to me, but that is just a vague feeling; it may stem as much from my own facebook fatigue as from any concrete reality. It will be interesting to watch, at any rate.
The joindiaspora guys, in a generally good response to my questions, conclude by asking:
[W]hat would be un-pragmatic about giving four excited dudes who spent their last semester of school thinking about a problem you are “worried-about-but-can’t-deal-with-now,” twenty bucks so they can take an honest crack at solving it? :)
Lots of people asked some variant on ‘it is just $20′ or whatever. First, I tend to be one of these people who don’t give token amounts to charity- I prefer to give larger amounts to a small number of projects that have very high impact (or very high odds of success if they aren’t having an impact yet.)
But the money is secondary. The important thing is that there are already a fairly good number of projects in this space, with a fairly small amount of users, developers, testers, and attention to spread between them. And to be blunt, I don’t want someone coming in with more web design and marketing sense than actual hacking chops and using up all the oxygen in the room. I think DiSo did this to some extent, frankly. So yes, giving a little bit of money to someone can be quite counterproductive and unpragmatic- and I wanted to reassure myself that I wouldn’t be contributing to that problem again.
Given that it looks like they’re going to be doing this crazy thing ($13K raised of their $10K target) that concern is now irrelevant.
(untitled) by Môsieur J. [version 3.0b], used under CC-BY.
So some thoughts on the rest of the responses, again in hopes that they are supportive and constructive:
We plan to “build less.”
Hooray! Most of these questions don’t have right answers, but this one did. And the followup priorities seem reasonable- those probably are the right minimum bits necessary. That said, where people have already built things, consider building less than less by working with other projects. Status.net comes screamingly to mind for the message passing component, but I’m sure there are others. Don’t just build shared specs- where possible, build shared code.
We see all of this communication happening between two Diaspora servers, rather than strictly between peers.
This seems like the very pragmatic solution to me; all the talk of real peer-to-peer is terrific but that is a very hard slog- both technically (getting it working) and socially (getting users to install it.)
With regards to DiSo, the response had one set of great things, and one part that was very ambiguous to me:
It seems to us that all of the previous attempts at solving the problem are trying to create the perfect solution in the first version.
I think this is right, and I’m heartened to hear the talk about building answers that satisfy rather than perfect. These are all signs
of excellent taste (not just this sentence, but many of the things both in this specific answer and in the entire blog post.)
Ambiguously:
[DiSo] tried to add on to WordPress, a project which was not designed from the ground up to be a distributed
network.
I’d love to hear more elaboration about ‘designed from the ground up to be a distributed network.’ WordPress has
proven to be a very flexible platform for a lot of things, and it both publishes and consumes structured data very well to that distributed network we call the internet (particularly that subset of the distributed network that consists of Atom/RSS publishers and consumers- I subscribe successfully to many friend’s wordpress blogs in something that looks very much to me like a distributed network.) In addition, things have improved since DiSo started, since there is now PuSH, possibly webfinger, etc. So which features are you looking for in a ‘designed from the ground up’ distributed network that wordpress doesn’t have? I’m not saying that wordpress is the solution, but I’m curious to hear more about what it specifically lacks.
With regards to Mugshot… I wish the Red Hat folks had posted a good post-mortem on that; to the best of my recollection I never saw one. My own sense is that: (1) it was very difficult for others to set up, so it never got an outside development community, and no one looked to it as a distributed solution to the problem. (2) The community it attracted was heavily tech-y, so the community that built on it looked to outsiders (frankly) like it was a bunch of nerds, which made it hard to expand into a more broad-based audience. (e.g., it was a great source of community for linux distributions, not so much for sports. Identica has the same problem relative to twitter; compare a search for lebron on twitter to a search for lebron on identica some time. Ditto Bieber or Gaga. This is very related to Pick The Right Customers.) Both are problems worth being aware of.
Solid answers on specs and services, including a couple projects I hadn’t been aware of- usually a good sign (even if one of them appears to be completely insane :)
We will be constantly sharing our ideas, and 100% of our code at the end of the summer.
I’m still not clear on why no code until the end of the summer. Care to elaborate? I’m not an absolutist on this- mostly for reasons related to bikeshedding and design- but it does seem like an odd default choice.
We think in the future (after the summer), we will work on an easy installation…
Only clearly wrong answer of the whole thing. Easy installation should be baked-in from day one- adding it afterwards is hard. As a bonus, it helps you write automated tests (since automated deployment is easy) and easy installation helps you choose the right customers by helping you attract users who are interesting in talking to other people rather than playing with software.
What are your three favorite books on software development? three favorite essays? what about on design?
Is this one of the questions where if I don’t say “Kernighan and Ritchie,” “Getting Real”, “Mythical Man-Month,” “Don’t Make Me Think!” or something like that, you will disapprove? :)
Yeah, sort of. But ‘Getting Real’ was the right answer. ;) (I sort of wish I had the time to write a mashup of Getting Real and Producing OSS, maybe with a dash of The Poignant Guide.) I also highly recommend Rework and Designing From Both Sides of the Screen. Blog-wise, you might find this list interesting, though not necessarily pertinent to this discussion.
Finally:
We bought him some arepas. They were delicious.
I’m sort of bitter that you live near that particular deliciousness. Also that you called me an old dude. But mostly because I miss those arepas. And the yo-yos. Enjoy one or two for me during your hacking breaks. :)
So lots of friends were tweeting this morning about Diaspora, a project to raise funds to get a summer’s worth of hacking done on a distributed, Libre social network. A distributed, Libre social network would be a terrific thing to have; I’d love to support it. And I love the eager energy I’m seeing around Diaspora.
Questioned Proposal, by Eleaf, used under CC-BY
But I’m also keenly aware that distributed social networks are hard, and so I’d only give of my money (or my time) to someone who looks like they have what it takes to take a serious stab at the problem. They’re hard:
So here are some questions for Diaspora, or really for anyone working in this space. These are not questions with right answers, necessarily. But anyone serious about solving this problem probably has at least some answers for them, so showing that you’ve given them some thought will go a long way towards convincing people that you’re serious about attacking the problem. If you haven’t given them thought yet, I could think of worse places to start. :)
I don’t mean to ask these questions to piss on anyone’s parade; I deeply want to believe. Heck, what I want to do is fly to New York, sit down in a room, and help you brainstorm and plan. But unfortunately I’m a pragmatist with a day job. I can’t directly help out. So instead I offer these questions. Answer these1 and you’ll begin convincing people that you are also pragmatists: that you’ve thought hard about the questions at hand and you are worth investing in. And I’ll be first in line to do that.
(I should note that unlike some I don’t need code; I think code that is created without much thinking is all too common and frequently damaging. But if you don’t have code, I suggest doing planning- and talking about it- before doing a PR week. :)
I love leechblock. It really helps keep my life sane. I was working some with it this morning to tweak my settings, and it seemed like a good time to write about three features I’d kill for, even to the point of putting up money for them if there were a way to sponsor features (or sponsor third-party hacking- bounties, if you will):
It may well be time to port leechblock to jetpack and rethink the UI as well, but those are bigger projects that I can’t randomly beg (or bribe) people to do.
There are lots of sources of links these days- delicious, twitter, and blogs. Many of these are interesting, but not so interesting that I want to read them all the time. Currently I have to decide either to read or not read these people.
I’d like to add a third option: to have a ‘middle’ pool of sources who I don’t read directly, but who are monitored and serve as pointers to other, interesting things. I think having such a third option would let me read less (because I’d stop skimming these intermediate sources), but still also give me fairly good confidence that I’m not missing important things that I should read.
The outline of the software in my head goes something like this:
Step 1: User provides a list of RSS feeds (a mix of blogs, twitter/identica, and delicious feeds).
Step 2: A harvester collects the contents of said RSS feeds.1
Step 3: Parse the content of those feeds for URLs and dump them in a db.2
Step 4: Unshorten the URLs if necessary. 3
Step 5: When a particular url has been mentioned X times in the past Y days4, fetch the URL5, find the content within it6, and jam it in an RSS feed for consumption along with the rest of my top-level RSS feeds.
Bonus step: mash up snippets from the posts/twitters/delicious feeds to provide context for the URL’s content, similar to what Google Reader does when friends comment on a feed item.
I feel like someone must have done this already. If not, the pieces are available (see the footnotes for details on many of the pieces); I sure wish I had the time/skill to put them together myself. :/ This project is one of the things I wish we had more reliable bounty infrastructure for- I’d actually put money up for it if I thought there were a reliable way to get some matching funds and find good developers for it.
Ideas, either about the rough feature sketch, existing software that fits this need, or about methods to make it happen, are all welcome.